Thanks for reading these excerpts of the story that is my life. Comments are appreciated.

groove tube

This is weird junky writing, but it was interesting to me at the time. Maybe I’ ll pick it up again some day. I may need to start drinking or something to ever become a fiction writer:

The world is being swallowed up by cheap music, tacky visuals, bad smells, meanness and artificial foodlike substances. This happens, has happened in the past. Will happen again.

The groove tube is invisible by not hiding. This is easy in the city. Throw a metal tube over it, or a metal box… people don’t even see it. All around mpls and saint paul there are groove tubes. The groove tube is used for what?

The groove tube is for music. It sends grooves up and around the city, from the city out into the country. It’s filled with a slurry of grooves, beats, melodies, riffs, tunes, bass runs, harmonies, rhythms, rhymes, songs, lines.

Grooves, beats, songs, rhymes

Tunes, riffs, melodies, times

Harmonies, tones, good vibrations

Echos, descants, incantations

Bent notes, straight notes, grace notes, trebles

tremolos, vibratos, arias and bellows

rhythms, hooks, codas, rests

pianos, fortes, birdsongs, trills

So they flow through there into the sewer system or into the gas system or electric lines. Then music is released around the city, pumped out to the country or out from the country. There’s a kind of musical density that wants to equalize. Sometimes there’s too much music out-state, that gets shipped into the city. Sometime there’s a glut of music in the city, that goes out to the suburbs for consumption there.

If the instruments don’t get back to their rightful owner, the flow of the groove-tube will be blocked and get stagnant. V and E and their rightful owner were actually a key part of the system of musical equilibrium. A song in, a song out. That’s the rule. But since TV there haven’t been as many songs in, people still took songs out, oh sure they did. Songs and music. Music was all sorts of things. Door hinges squeaking, cats purring, water flowing.

V and E needed to get back to Wizzary.

That way crickets and door hinges, waterfalls, aspen trees, chickadees, robins, tap-shoes, door-bells, soundtracks, train-tracks, all get to keep their music.

One thing that keeps things in line is the groove tube. The groove tube is filled with good, groovy things. Instruments, sweets, salts, spices, music, symmetry, balanced asymmetry, lines and circles, angles and intersections. It hasn’t always been a groove-tube. Once upon a time it was system of springs and underground streams. In places where the underground has been disturbed and remodeled, the groove tube had to be laid out on the surface.

It’s connected to cold-air returns, sidewalk vents and dripping faucets all over the world. If you really want to know about the groove tube, you’ve got to let go of whatever it is you think is actually being piped around the country in those random pipelines. Oh sure, some of them carry oil or natural gas, some are conduits for electrical and fiber optic cables. Sure. But some are full of inspiration. Grooves. And sometimes, just like with oil pipelines, they do spring a leak.

Why don’t you hear about an inspiration leak? Well you do. You just didn’t know that’s what it was. Silicone Valley? Massive Groove tube breech. Motown? Catastrophic break. Cuba? Slow leak. Southern Soul food ? Groove tube failure. The Gettysburg address? Random spring in the middle of nowhere, stepped in by a lanky gentleman racking his brains about what to say to a country ripped ragged. Memphis, New Orleans, Switzerland, Hollywood, Italy, Ithaca New York, Weimar in Germany.

Ideally, the groove tube disseminates inspiration evenly around the world. It works about as well as anything else, which is to say, meh, it’s ok. But without it, the world would be a bleak, bleak place indeed. There are agents of the groove-tube, there always have been. Mostly these are people with their own jobs, living lives completely under the radar, but maintaing the tube and the flow of inspiration.

In addition to the groove tube there are other groovy items. Instruments, pots and kettles, perfumeries, pencil makers who knew?